Let's Reflect on Jesus

I’m not sure if you know the story of how I came into an intimate relationship with Jesus. It’s a story that begins, in great measure, with a very honest prayer that rose up from my heart in August 1998. I was 19 years old, about to enter my junior year of college, and I had finally gotten around to reading a book that one of my professors had given me in a previous semester.

Reading that book changed my life.

It was not the book’s intention, I don’t think, to bring me face to face with my lack of understanding of grace and of Jesus, but that’s exactly what it did. One afternoon, while sprawled on top of my bed in my apartment, reading the book, that realization became so real that the book fell from my hands and I bowed my head and confessed to God: “I don’t understand my need for grace, and I don’t understand my need for Jesus.” 

I had known Jesus my whole life. I don’t have any memory of life without him, in fact. I was always aware of his presence near me, even as a very, very young girl. But the circumstances of my life and some of the natural proclivities of my way of being conspired to take me on a very long journey — the long way around, you might say — to finally understanding my personal need for both. 

I’ve been reflecting on that very honest prayer of 13 years ago a lot lately. I’ve been struck by God’s incredible faithfulness to answer it. I think God continues to answer it every day, in fact, because my awareness of my need for grace and for Jesus only continue to grow. 

Why am I sharing this with you? 

Because my life and mind and heart are full — so full — of Jesus these days, and I want you to know this Jesus, too. 

For the next little while, I am going to be using the daily posts in this space to reflect on this Jesus I have come to know. It is my prayer that these reflections will create an opportunity for you to know him, too, if you do not know him yet — or simply to reflect on the Jesus you have come to know, if you already know him, too.

xoxo,

Christianne 

Discernment: It's an Embrace of Mystery

As I shared in a previous post in this discernment series, we often think of discernment as finding an answer to our question of choosing option A, B, or C for our lives in a particular moment. But really, it’s about something of a much greater scope.

It’s about the wholistic work God is doing in our lives — our lives seen in their totality, from beginning to end — as he seeks to conform us more and more into the people we actually are and the image of God we were created to bear. 

This means there is quite an element of mystery to embrace when we’re about discernment. 

Think of it this way.

Even when we wait and look and listen and discern the invitation of God in our lives toward a particular decision, we don’t know what will happen once that decision has been made. We may discern that, yes, we are going to accept that job offer — but even if we ascertain that job offer to be the next stone on our pathway forward, we don’t fully comprehend why. 

We only know that God is nudging us toward it. It aligns with the wholistic work he’s been about in our lives. It’s clearly the right choice for us at this point in our story. 

But toward what end? Not simply for the job itself, but toward the end of it being used to further our formation. 

The decision was not a destination but part of a larger process — a process we cannot fully perceive or apprehend and never will. It exists in the mind of God. 

Our part is to discern and follow, and in that sense, to be part of a great mystery that’s beyond us.

This morning, I read a short string of words in Psalm 40 that reminded me of just this truth: 

More and more people are seeing this: 

they enter the mystery,

abandoning themselves to God.

— Psalm 40:3

Life with God teems with mystery. He is so much greater than we are, and he is intimately acquainted with our life and ways and story. He knows the work he is about in us, and we see that work but dimly, simply following the next stone on the path.

Will you accept the holy mystery of this life with God, the invitation to something greater than your eyes alone can see about your life?

Discernment Concerns a Process, Not a Conclusion

When I was at the retreat that prompted me to write this short series on discernment, one of the instructors shared a quote by Richard Rohr that I find to be immensely helpful when considering the role discernment plays in our lives: 

“God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea. There is someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.” 

— Richard Rohr, The Naked Now, p. 23

This gets at the idea I shared in my previous post about all of life being a process of foundational experiences that reveal to us the unique story of redemption and healing and wholeness that God is about in our lives. 

So often, when we are in a process of discernment about a choice we’re trying to make in our lives, we are focused on the concluding outcome of that decision. What is the right decision here? What am I supposed to do? Did I make the right choice? Have I landed in the place I was supposed to land? 

But in the quote from Richard Rohr above, we are reminded that life with God is more about living through a life with God than arriving at a particular point or conclusion or decision. Life with God is a verb and a process, he says. It is active and ongoing. It involves continuous change, and that change concerns our inward and outward being. 

Who is God making us to be? What is the fullness and wholeness of us that is his aim over the whole course of our lives? And how does one decision or another affirm that work of wholeness in us? 

These are the real questions at the heart of discernment. 

It is not about one right answer or another that will bring us to a place of arrival. It is about how a decision continues to shape us into the person God intends for us to become in the broader, longevity-seeking scope of our lives. 

What is the work of healing, wholeness, and redemption God seems to be about in your life? And how might the decisions you are seeking to make be a part of that broader work?

How Our Foundational Experiences Can Aid Our Discernment III

Earlier in this series on discernment, I invited you to consider your foundational experiences of God, and in the second post on that subject, we narrowed our consideration to those experiences when we knew in an intimate way that God was speaking to us or intervening in our lives. 

Today, I’d like to broaden our consideration of foundational experiences to those experiences in our lives that made an impact on us in some significant or meaningful way. 

What are the experiences that marked you, scarred you, taught you, helped you, harmed you? What are the memories you revisit often, that made a deep impression on your heart? What moments in your life contributed in great measure to the person you have become?

I’d like to suggest that even these experiences can aid us in our process of discernment, too.

In fact, I would like to suggest that every meaningful moment of our lives — the moments that form the stuff of our story — are part of the specific story of redemption, grace, healing, and purpose God is weaving through our specific lives. 

It is my deep conviction that the stories we are living are not senseless.

In the places we experienced deep wounding, God wants to touch and heal us. In the places we were misguided, God wants to come and redirect our steps. In the places we experienced great consolation, God wants to teach us about himself and about ourselves.

When we look back over our lives, we may see the litterings of tiny moments or big moments that made an impact in some way. And it is in those moments that God wants to enter in and heal, touch, teach, and guide us.

He wants to make us whole and complete, lacking nothing, and therefore is about the work of redemption in our lives in exactly those places that broke us, splintered us, harmed us, or de-formed us.

This is how our foundational experiences — whether they were specific encounters with God or simply encounters with life — can guide us in our process of discernment. 

What is God about in you, because of your story? What are the themes of needed redemption in your life? How might that inform the decision you are seeking to make? Which path will take you deeper into the healing or fullness of that redemption?

How Our Foundational Experiences Can Aid Our Discernment II

We’ve been talking quite a bit lately about our foundational experiences — and specifically our foundational experiences of God — and how they can serve as a guide for us when we are in need of discernment.

There are so many ways to undertake a process of discernment — so many ways this subject has been explored and examined and written about through the centuries and the ages — and so much of that material is immensely helpful in uncovering what discernment is, what the process is about, and how to learn and determine the best path forward. 

We’ve been spending a bit more dedicated time in this small series on discernment exploring an aspect of discernment that is, I think, quite lesser known and considered as a point of value in the process. 

Let’s consider for a moment what discernment is about. What is being discerned, exactly, when we are needing discernment? 

Usually this is a process of trying to determine the right way forward in our lives. This could apply to a large decision we are trying to make — whether to take a particular job, whether to move to a new place, whether someone we are dating is the right person for us to share our lives with, what to do with our lives.

It can also apply to the smaller, everyday encounters of our lives. How ought we respond to that person with whom we have such difficulty? What is my real motive in wanting to pursue a particular path right now? Is this the right church for me? 

And then, there’s perhaps the most intimate question of all: how is God speaking to me right now?

As I mentioned above, there are volumes that could fill whole wings of very large libraries on the subject of discernment. It is clearly not a simple subject for us humans to understand, and we have been trying to understand it and seeking guidance on the matter from the wise ones we know for a very, very long time. 

I think something helpful to notice here is that discernment is needed in those very places that are not clear cut. If there was a simple answer to our question — a very clear response that God indicates would be the right way forward in a given situation, given what has been indicated to us in the scriptures or the tradition of the church — then discernment is not really needed. 

Discernment is required in those very grey and fuzzy places where we don’t have the readily available gift of a black-and-white answer on the matter. 

And this is where our foundational experiences, I’m coming to believe, can provide an immense gift of their own.

One thing I will say about this approach to incorporating our foundational experiences into our process of discernment is that it assumes God is personally acquainted with each one of us. And not just acquainted with us, but invested in us.

It assumes that the significant experiences of our lives — every single one of them — is part of the specific formation God is about in us. 

I’m going to write a bit more about this on Friday. (I won’t be writing here tomorrow, which is the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States.) But until then, I’ll invite you to consider this question: 

Have you ever viewed the foundational experiences of your life as significant to God in some way and integrally a part of the formation he is about in your life? 

How Our Foundational Experiences Can Aid Our Discernment I

So, it’s taken several posts to get here, but I’d like to invite you to consider how your foundational experiences of God can help you navigate through a process of discernment. 

I mentioned in Friday’s post that I’d like for you to recall those foundational experiences of God that you knew at a very deep, intuitive, gut-level place inside of yourself were a true encounter of God interacting with you. 

As you take and hold those experiences, I’d like to invite you to regard those experiences as having provided you with a sense of God that can continue to direct you. 

To make this a bit more practical, let me share with you an example from my own life.

This has to do with the way Kirk and I have learned to discern God’s direction in our life about big decisions — where to live, where to work, whether to say yes to an opportunity being offered to us, and so on.

We’ve learned that, for us, God’s direction often carries the quality of a stone emerging out of the water at just the right time. 

This sense of God’s movement in our life was born out of several foundational experiences that all carried that similar quality of God’s provision and direction and which we have now learned is a means of guiding us continually in these kind of life decisions.

One of the first times I can remember this happening was when Kirk and I got engaged on St. Patrick’s Day in 2006.

I had a feeling Kirk would propose that day, even though we hadn’t discussed any particulars about getting engaged, nor had we discussed anything about when or where we would get married, where we would live when we got married (while we were dating, I lived in Southern California and he lived in Central Florida), or what our life would look like after we joined together. 

Still, I had a feeling we were going to get engaged on the weekend that we did, so in preparation, I began to mentally brainstorm some of the more specific details I knew we would discuss once he asked me to marry him and I said yes. 

One of the first things I knew we would discuss was the wedding. Would it happen in California, where my family lived, or in Florida? Would it be a large or small affair? Would it be a regular kind of affair at all? 

This was a second marriage for both of us, and I had known all along, after my first marriage ended, that if I ever married a second time, I would not want a normal kind of ceremony. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I just knew all along I would want it to be different.

I began to consider the idea of eloping to Ireland.

What a strange idea, I know!

But it seemed very much in line with who we were — we had first met and become casual acquaintances in Ireland, we had begun our initial e-mail correspondence on St. Patrick’s Day, and we were (most likely) going to be getting engaged on St. Patrick’s Day the following year. You could say that Ireland already loomed rather large in our life and history together.

But the real “foundational experience of God” in our life of decision-making together happened when we did, indeed, get engaged. For the very first time, we began to discuss some of the particulars and possibilities for our wedding, and I shared with Kirk the idea I’d begun holding in my heart about the possibility of eloping to Ireland.

I am not joking when I say that he pulled the car over to the side of the road, opened the trunk, and pulled out the latest issue of National Geographic that he had received in the mail that very same week. The cover story concerned the ancient Celts, and inside the cover story was the mention of a monastery ruins site on the island of Inis Mor in Ireland where a priest regularly performed wedding rites. 

Needless to say, that’s where we got married, and I cannot imagine the process being any easier than it was.

And really, our continuing life together these last five years has been comprised of many similar moments.

It often looks like this.

We will begin a seemingly innocent conversation — perhaps about whether to move out of our first studio apartment, or whether to revisit the possibility of employment for Kirk in a certain place, or what sort of next steps might be possible for me when my graduate program ends — and very simply and deftly, the answer to our question will emerge out of nowhere, often very soon after the conversation begins. We’ll come upon a house for rent while out for a Sunday drive, or the phone will ring and it will include a job offer we didn’t know existed at that very same place we had been considering employment, or we’ll be invited to breakfast with friends and a new opportunity will be presented that I couldn’t have imagined for myself. 

We’ve learned again and again that God brings just the right thing at just the right time to us, without our having to go searching or hunting or planning or forcing it along, just like our wedding in Ireland came together for us.

Accordingly, since we’ve learned that God often works in this way with us, we can revisit this foundational sense of God’s work in our life when presented with new opportunities. Does it have that similar quality as all those other opportunities did, like a stone emerging from the water at just the right time and place? Did it come to us organically? Does it feel like it’s happening in an unforced and natural manner?

These things guide our decision-making often, and it’s one practical example of how a foundational experience of God’s movement in our life can aid in our process of discernment.

How might your own foundational experiences of God guide you in a similar way? What sense do they give of God’s interaction in your life that can provide a compass of sorts for your decision-making?

More on Foundational Experiences

I mentioned that I’d be writing a short series on discernment for the duration of this week, but we’ve gotten to the end of the week and I’m realizing there are a few more thoughts I’d like us to consider together on this subject. So I’ve decided to extend the discernment series a bit longer into next week. I hope that’s okay with you! 

Accordingly, today I’d like to revisit the ideas shared yesterday about our foundational experiences of God. 

I realized after writing that post that in asking you to consider your foundational experiences of God, those experiences may not have been positive. Perhaps you came into the faith without realizing fully what that meant. Perhaps you were raised in a church or a home where your understanding of faith was twisted into a pretzel and all that resulted was fear and confusion and pain. 

What we might term “foundational experiences of God” may be foundational indeed — but they may have done more harm than good, and now we’re left to pick up the pieces.

So today I’d like to invite you to consider your foundational experiences of God in a slightly different, more focused light. 

Let’s recall those moments in life when you just knew it was God. Perhaps it was a moment when the truth you’d learned about God’s love or truth or forgiveness or grace somehow clicked and became real for you, not just head knowledge anymore. Or perhaps it was a moment when you knew God intervened in circumstances because there was just no other possible explanation. Or perhaps it was as simple as a felt presence surrounding you or following you around or showing up at occasionally odd moments, and you just knew it was God somehow.

These are foundational experiences of God, too. They’re the foundational experiences of God that teach us, truly, who God is to us — how he intervenes in our lives and relates himself to us. 

This is the kind of foundational experience Jesus had in those baptismal waters when he heard that voice from heaven speaking his beloved sonship over him. He knew it was God. He knew it was truth. It was not twisted or confused in any way.

So, what about you?

What are those foundational experiences of God in your own life? What do they, upon considering them, speak to you about God? How did he relate himself to you in those moments? What did he communicate about himself to you? 

How Do You Discern?

I was at a retreat this past weekend with the community of people from whom I received my spiritual direction training over the last three years. Each November, they host an instructional retreat weekend, and this weekend’s theme was the topic of discernment. 

How do you discern the movement and invitation of God in your life? 

This was the question at the heart of the retreat weekend, and I thought I would use some of the reflections I gained from the weekend as the basis of this week’s postings. 

To open the conversation on discernment this week, then, I’d like to invite you to consider your usual path for discerning the way forward at critical decision-points in your life. 

How do you go about making decisions in your life? How do you know which path you ought to take? What has been your typical process? Do you have a typical process?

Letting the Truth Be the Truth

I shared recently that I’ve been experiencing emotions that are quite new and powerful to me. They rise up, quite unexpected, and honestly unsettle me.

I’m not used to feeling my heart on my sleeve. I’m the kind of person who takes in an experience and ponders it slowly, deciding how I feel about it and how I want to respond. I’m slow to feel, you might say, always wanting my feelings to match what seems most fitting or right or true to a situation. 

As much as I have often thought that approach to my emotions is the equivalent of wisdom, I’m learning these days, as I experience my emotions much more in the moment, that it keeps me from really knowing myself. This slow to feel approach has served as a shield of sorts — a shield that keeps me from knowing my heart, my emotions, my true response to situations, and even, in some ways, the depths of my own depravity.

That’s not always helpful. 

And so God has been giving me the gift of my emotions lately, even as they don’t feel much like a gift at all. When the emotions are hard, or when they cause me to sin against another in my heart, I wish this gift wasn’t being given to me at all. 

And yet I can read the psalms and be reminded that this is, in fact, a good thing: 

Count yourself lucky — 

God holds nothing against you

and you’re holding nothing back from him.

When I kept it all inside,

my bones turned to powder,

my words became daylong groans.

The pressure never let up;

all the juices of my life dried up.

Then I let it all out;

I said, “I’ll make a clean breast of my failures to God.”

Suddenly the pressure was gone —

my guilt dissolved,

my sin disappeared.

— Psalm 32:2-5

Those images of bones turning to powder, of pressure never letting up, and of the juices of one’s life completely drying up … they’re pretty vivid, aren’t they? We get this sense of what happens when we hold everything in and don’t let it out. Our bones dissolve to powder from the pressure of holding those feelings down and down and down. Just like a covered pot of steaming food will eventually dry up if it’s left covered too long, so will the juices of our own lives dry up when we hold inside the truth of the emotions we feel. 

So I’m doing as the psalmist says today and counting myself lucky. I’m lucky because the truth of my emotions can’t go unnoticed right now, and so I bring that truth to God. And in the places where those emotions cause me to sin, I confess it and am set free. 

On Being Tied to Others

Recently, I had an experience that was pretty visceral. I was feeling pretty beat up and insecure, and I put out an SOS call to my spiritual director, Elaine. Thankfully, she had some time to connect with me by phone that day, and after pouring out my woes, I landed on an image to describe the way I felt. 

In the image, I was three years old with a ponytail on the top of my head, and people were grabbing me by that ponytail and banging me around at whim. 

Ouch. Pretty visceral, right? 

What absolutely broke my heart was seeing my own response inside that image. I was flinging my arms out wide in a desperate attempt to grab the leg of the one(s) flinging me around, trying valiantly to grab hold and hang on tight, as if to say, “Love me! Care for me! Approve of me! Want me!”

Ouch again. This is me in one of my most vulnerable places. I struggle with things like this.

Thank goodness for Elaine. She asked if Jesus was there, and he was.

I wouldn’t have seen Jesus if she hadn’t asked me to notice him. 

But when she asked me to notice Jesus, there he was, sitting on a set of steps in front of a brownstone walk-up residence off to the side. All that flinging and flailing was happening in the middle of a neighborhood street, and Jesus sat quietly on the brownstone steps, facing the street, watching the scene unfold before him.

I found it interesting he didn’t try to rescue me. He didn’t get off the steps and interfere in the incident. Instead, he looked at me with calmness and knowledge in his demeanor and his eyes and simply communicated, “You don’t have to take that.”

It was like I had a choice. Really? 

So I gave it a shot. I disentangled myself from the abusive swinging and banging around, and I went to sit by Jesus on the steps. And as soon as I sat down, it was like I came back into possession of my whole self. I was 32 years old, inhabiting the fullness of my story, my life, and my body. 

I was whole and pulsing with aliveness. Jesus and I sat shoulder to shoulder, looking out on the neighborhood street before us, and talked like two adults who know, love, and respect each other. 

Do you struggle with something similar — being tied to the whims of others, enslaved to their approval or treatment? What might it be like to receive the full acceptance and respect of the companionship of Jesus instead? 

A (Small) Glimpse into Formation

In the Look at Jesus gospel immersion course I’m teaching right now, we’re enjoying the privilege of doing just what the course title suggests: looking at Jesus. And when I look at Jesus, I can’t help but fall in love. 

Here is God, hanging around on earth with all kinds of people full of earth and grit. And he doesn’t recoil. Instead, he touches them. He invites them to share his meals. He takes time each day to teach them about the kingdom of God and spends vast amounts of time healing their battered and broken bodies. 

In short, he shows us that God is about coming to where we are and being with us. And not just being with us, but giving us more than we had before.

When I first began learning this aspect of Jesus — I mean, really getting that it was true — I fell completely in love with him. Never had I experienced such love and acceptance. Jesus comes to me. He doesn’t expect me to come to where he is.

What’s more, I noticed that we moved. If I was laying on the floor, curled up in a ball, Jesus met me there. He didn’t hurry me off the floor. He didn’t condemn me for being there. He met me. 

But eventually, I did sit up. Or stand up. Or walk. Or move around.

I learned, through an ongoing process of experiencing this over and over, that Jesus moves with me at a pace that is natural and required to bring about my growth. It’s not forced, but it does happen.

I’ve also learned along the way that there’s a point when something shifts. 

After a time of being with Jesus in this way, being built up inside his love, becoming rooted and established in it, receiving all the love and acceptance he has to offer, the natural course of events begins to push us outward.

We go forth into a new territory, and in that territory, we are much less focused on ourselves.

It’s not so much about Jeus meeting us where we are anymore (although that will always continue to happen throughout our lives as we keep growing). Instead, it’s about us meeting other people where they are, just like Christ met us. And it’s about venturing out to meet God at our own initiative, too. 

It’s about loving God and loving neighbor. And it starts to just happen.

I think this happens because of the love of Christ compels us.

When we truly experience love, it roots us down, and that gives us the strength and room to grow branches outward. We start to grow outward, much less focused on the inner work of growing down roots from a tiny seed, because that’s what we were ultimately made to do.

But it’s a process, and each stage of that process is necessary and beautiful.

Where in the process are you?

Take Me as I Am

I was at the contemplative eucharist service at our church last night, and the Iona chant we’ve been singing recently is a simple verse that begins with the words, “Take, O take me as I am.” 

I couldn’t help but notice how appropriate those words are for me to sing right now. Lately I’ve been struggling with powerful emotions I’m not used to feeling. They rise to the surface in sudden moments, and words flit through my mind or stumble out of my mouth that seem so unlike the person I’ve known myself to be. 

In some ways, I see these emotions as quite helpful. They’re helping me know my heart in a deeper way than I’ve known it before. I’m becoming aware of things that matter to me, and of ways I’m being invited to change and form and grow and interact with the world around me in different ways than I have before.

But in other ways, the power of these emotions scares me. I’m not so sure they’re wholly good. Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t. Maybe they’re both. (That’s probably the case.) But the part that doesn’t feel the holiness of these emotions is the part that drives me to my knees before God, begging for mercy and wisdom. 

I’m so aware of my frailty and fallenness. 

And so this simple chant, asking God to take me as I am, provides great comfort. It reminds me that God does take me as I am, that God does meet me in this place, that God does love and accept me right here, even as the formation process of these emotions in me is yet unfinished. 

I’m so thankful for that grace. 

What is it like for you to invite God to take you as you are, right in this very moment? 

Continued Thoughts on Personality and Silence

On a previous post, I shared that I have an extroverted friend who is helping me think about God in new ways.

We’ve been continuing our dialogue on introversion and extroversion, and I’ve been learning so much from him about how an extrovert can connect to God in meaningful ways. He’s been kind to share with me, for instance, some pretty amazing examples of how he connects to God that involve group discussion, podcasts, corporate worship experiences, and even exercise. 

Isn’t it amazing that God is bigger than our own personalities? I love that. 

I also love the way two readers here, Terri and Sara, helped me think more deeply about whether silence is the place we grow and heal. They were so wise to say that something being the case for one person doesn’t necessarily mean it is the case for everyone. I think this is so true, and a good reminder for all of us.

I know that for me in particular, being the contemplative introvert that I am, it can be easy to relate to the healing, nurturing side of silence and contemplative prayer. The words of Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton, in particular, are so instructive and encouraging to me. They seem to speak my native language. 

But for someone like my extroverted friend, dialogue with other believers or experiencing the church in corporate worship can also be vastly healing and nurturing. God can be just as present and accessible in those places as he is in a hermitage or monastery or prayer closet. 

All of this has gotten me thinking about the many dimensions of God and his vast personality.

God’s being contains all of the proclivities and preferences that we as humans experience and exhibit. So no matter who we are or how we experience the world, we can find some measure of God there. 

Isn’t that kind of mind-blowing?

I love how vast God is. 

PS: Speaking of Terri, she wrote a beautiful reflection on how silence removes the usual barriers between us and our neighbors, which I found deeply edifying and helpful. Highly recommend!

What Is It Like to Consider Going Home?

I’ve just begun reading a new book by Ian Morgan Cron called Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me. It is “a memoir of sorts” by the author and begins with an epigraph by Wendell Berry that says, “When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.” The first chapter begins with a quote by Robert Lax that says, “Sometimes we go on a search for something and do not know what we are looking for until we come again to our beginning.” 

Pretty powerful quotes, aren’t they? 

I’m pleased to share that the rest of the book is quite powerful, too — at least, what I’ve read of it so far. It is the author’s attempt to wade through the “harrowing straits of memory” in order to make peace with his history and sail more freely into his future. 

Right up front, the author says this about doing this kind of excavation of our histories:

“Home is where we start, and whether we like it or not, our life is a race against time to come to terms with what it was or wasn’t.”

What do you think of this idea? 

Speaking from my own experience, I find it to be true. Pretty much the entirety of my adult life, from age 19 to the place I stand now at 32, has been an exercise in going back to my beginnings to make sense of them and find healing, peace, and wholeness. 

I wrote on my personal blog last night that the first big chunk of years devoted to this excavation brought pain, anger, regret, and grief. I did not find peace for many years, but I knew, all along, that peace would be found on the other side somehow. In my experience, God had clearly invited me to visit that excavation site and hunker down for quite some time.

The excavation is still happening, really, and probably will be underway the rest of my life. But the biggest chunks of history discovered and explored in those earliest of days are now, thankfully, in the polishing phase. That is something for which I regularly give thanks.

Going home takes work. It’s hard. It hurts. But I can’t imagine a more worthwhile endeavor, especially when the invitation is offered and then lived out in the presence of Jesus. 

What is going home like for you? Does the notion appeal to you? Scare you? Turn you off? Have you ever visited the excavation site of your history with Jesus as an excavation partner in the process? 

Becoming a God-Listener

Since April, I’ve been privileged to work alongside a team of people developing an online resource that offers hope to people who need a glimpse of God’s light in difficult places. It’s been such a meaningful and gratifying project to be a part of, and I’ve learned and grown so much through the experience. 

The project will wrap up in a few short weeks, and so I find myself asking one particular question with increasing regularity these days: What’s next? 

I’ve lived a rather unconventional life the last several years.

I left a full-time career in publishing in 2007 to pursue a path of contribution in the lives of people seeking their way. This led me, unexpectedly, to a ministry of spiritual direction and writing about the spiritual life and life of the heart. I have loved every moment of this journey and am so thankful for the way God has directed my steps along this path. 

But it has not been easy. 

It has required an immense amount of faith.

A lot of this journey has included that question: What’s next? Sometimes the work God has given me to do as I’ve trod this path of learning and growth has been freelance writing and editing; other times he’s given me special projects, like the one I’m currently finishing. 

God has been faithful, but each stepping stone has asked — and still asks — for my faith to believe it will emerge from the water at just the right time for me to step upon it. 

I find myself in that place of faith-testing yet again these days. 

Last week, I took a step forward to pursue a potential opportunity beyond the bounds of this current project, and I learned that potential opportunity wasn’t going to work out after all. I was disappointed. And it landed me back at that question yet again: What’s next? 

I texted my spiritual director, Elaine, about the lost opportunity and my disappointment that day. She knew I’d been exploring the possibility, and she had prayed with me recently about it. When I told her that I hoped God had something else in store and that I keep asking him to show me where to go, she responded:

You’re a good God listener. 

Her response encouraged me. It reminded me of the ways I’ve listened and heard and followed God’s lead before.

And then, over the weekend, I stumbled on the following prayer in 1 Kings from King Solomon. When he assumed the throne of Israel after his father, David, had died, God asked Solomon in a dream what he wanted as he began to rule the kingdom. Solomon responds: 

Give me a God-listening heart so I can lead your people well, discerning the difference between good and evil.

— 1 Kings 3:9

That prayer from Solomon has stuck with me the last few days. Give me a God-listening heart. It is my intent to lean deeper and deeper into that prayer. I want to follow the ways God wants me to go in this life of faith I lead. 

So here’s to faith. And to God-listening in the midst of it. 

The Role of Silence

Yesterday I asked what it’s like for you to experience silence. Today I want to share with you some words about silence that I read recently and hear your perspective on them: 

Some have said silence is the first language of God. It is in silence that we grow, we heal, and we open to God. 

I’m curious: what do you think of these statements? 

When I read these statements, I can’t help but consider each statement in its own right.

First, there’s the statement that silence is the first language of God. It makes me think of how God spoke the world into being — that he used words to do so. When God speaks, he creates. So before creation, there was just God, communing with God’s self.

It makes me wonder: does the Trinity require words to commune with itself?

Perhaps there is simply an all-perfect knowing that God has with God’s self that doesn’t require words at all.

And then there’s the statement that it is in silence that we grow, heal, and open to God. What do you think about this? 

I know that, for me, it is in silence that I’m able to get in touch with what is most true inside of me. When the noise of the outside world and the noise of my own internal chatter have quieted down, I can get in tune with what is true and then offer that to God. 

But I also know that conversation brings growth and healing, too.

Prayer can certainly look like a silent opening to God without the use of any words, but it can also be a conversation. Even in normal life, in conversations with soul friends, I experience growth and healing not just in a silent sitting together, but also through our conversations. 

Or perhaps the growth and healing of those conversations actually happens in the after-moments — the moments of taking in what was spoken about, of letting it sink in deep. 

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this.

What do you think of this notion of silence being the first language of God? What is your response to the idea that silence is the place we grow, heal, and open to God?

What Prayer of the Heart Looks Like

Hi, friends.

I want to begin by acknowledging the quiet in this space recently. I’ve been committed to writing in this space five days a week for you, and I still expect to maintain that rhythm here for the foreseeable future. But over these last couple weeks, life has caught up with me, and I’ve had to occasionally acknowledge the limits of my humanity once again. 

One thing is true: I’ve missed being present in this space each morning of the week with you.

This morning, though, I had the chance to sit quietly at my desk for the first time in several days. As I sat there, I could hear my mind buzzing like a lawn mower and whirling things around inside like a big and powerful leaf blower. But I sat quietly with all that internal mind-noise, glasses off and eyes closed, and let my mind descend into my heart. 

This is what prayer of the heart looks like for me. 

My mind, with all its buzzing and snapping, floated down into my heart and slowly settled. There, I saw my heart fold open, a bit like a water lily resting on a lily pad, opening to the honest truth of myself and opening to the presence of God with me. 

There is such a difference between the experience of the whirring and snapping of my mind and the experience of this prayer of the heart. I noticed that difference this morning.

When my mind is buzzing and plowing around, it’s like I’m talking to myself, trying to remember everything I need to do or dimly aware of the feelings surrounding me. I talk to myself about those feelings in my mind, telling myself: I feel sad. I’m overwhelmed. I’m scared. 

But in prayer of the heart, I talk to someone — God, specifically. 

When I open my heart like a water lily, laying my heart bare before God, and tell him what I think and feel, it’s an experience of relationship.

I feel sad. I’m overwhelmed. I’m scared.

It’s quite different to tell someone, with such vulnerability, what you are feeling, isn’t it?

What is it like for you to express the truth of yourself to another person? How is that different than expressing it just to yourself?

The Infinite Patience of God

Hello, friends. 

This morning, as I held the recent reflection series we just completed in my mind, I talked with God about why that series was important. Besides what we discussed about how God feels about our hearts, why was it important to discuss it in such detail at the time that we did? 

I thought about the city image we’ve been discussing here for a while, and then was reminded of a more recent post offered here about a darkened hallway and the entrance of the light of Jesus into that place. Do you remember that post? 

In it, we talked about the intent of Jesus to come to you in the places you are. We talked about his desire to find you. But what happens when he does? 

On that post, one of our community members, Lisa, offered a beautiful and perceptive comment about the quality of experiencing Jesus in a place like that: 

That image of Jesus offering light … is hugely powerful for me. There is such gentleness and safety in it — not a God who forces, but who invites, and waits patiently, with love and peace in the waiting, and not condemnation or guilt. 

Isn’t that beautiful? I’m so glad she shared that she has come to experience Jesus in that way. 

Also as part of her comment, Lisa mentioned a book called Stumbling Toward Faith by Renee Altson that includes a meditation on the parable Jesus told about the ninety-nine sheep and the one that was lost. In that meditation, Renee identified strongly with that one lost sheep and, when found by Jesus and invited back to the fold, she felt herself unready to return. Renee ends the story, Lisa says, by sharing that the shepherd, Jesus, “sat and waited with her for a long time.” 

The shepherd, Jesus, sat and waited with her for a long time … until she was ready to take the next step. 

On my personal blog, Lilies Have Dreams, I’ve shared recently about a long and intentional journey I took with Jesus through the woods. It was a season of deep formation for me — a time when I learned some new truths about my heart, grew in a lot of ways, and experienced pain and joy at varying increments. 

What often stood out to me during those several months I traveled through the woods with Jesus was the infinite patience he displayed as he journeyed with me, no matter where on the path we found ourselves. Whether I was struggling to receive a new truth, grieving newly discovered pieces of my heart, or basking in the joy of God’s grace and presence and love — whether I experienced light or darkness at any point on the path — Jesus stayed with me and was fully present and waited every single time.

There was never any pressure or expectation to hurry up and get to the next step of the journey. He just stood and waited with me for as long as I needed. 

As you journey into discovering the truth of your heart, what is it like for you to consider receiving the infinite patience of God with you in each discovery? 

Learning Your Heart: Spiritual Direction Helps, Too

In this short series on “Learning Your Heart,” we’ve been talking about some of the practical ways we can learn to get in touch with the reality of our hearts, since Jesus demonstrated over and over again — as did the prophets and teachers of the Old Testament — that it is the heart God truly cares to know inside of us.

Before stepping into the final suggestion of this series — that of meeting with a spiritual director — let’s take a minute to clarify what is meant by the word “heart.” It’s a word that gets commonly thrown around, isn’t it? It can be easy for us to think the heart refers to something sentimental or overly feely inside ourselves.

But let me be clear: that’s not what Jesus meant by the word at all.

By “heart,” Jesus is referring to the absolute core of who you are.

The heart, as Jesus described it, is the place inside of us that holds what we know, feel, and believe in the deep-down places, even if those things contradict what we might say and even tell ourselves we believe, know, and feel. 

I love that our hearts are not a mystery to God. Although they may be a mystery to us, and although what we discover there may embarrass or repulse us, it never surprises or repulses God.

God is interested in our getting to know the truth inside ourselves so that we can bring that into real relationship with him. 

It’s in the truth that real relationship happens.

So, this short series has been offered as a place to start. We’ve talked about paying attention to those subtle intimations that flicker into our awareness but rarely keep or capture our attention for different reasons. We’ve talked about collecting and reflecting on key moments in our lives that made a deep impression or formed us in some way. We’ve talked about practicing prayer of the heart. We’ve even talked about therapy. 

Today, to close out the series, I want to offer one more suggestion that can help you attend to the landscape of your heart, become aware of what’s really there, and bring that into relationship with God.

This suggestion is spiritual direction. 

You may have heard of spiritual direction before and wondered what it is. Is it mentoring? Counseling? Some strange way of submitting yourself to an authority who tells you what to do in your spiritual life? 

It’s actually none of those things.

Spiritual direction, plain and simple, creates a space for you to attend to your relationship with God.

It offers space to reflect on how God has been present to you in your life, or perhaps to consider ways God has not been present in the ways you had hoped. It creates a place to notice and talk to God about these things. And a spiritual director is someone who provides a listening, discerning, compassionate, caring presence and gives you the room to notice and connect to God in these ways. 

I can’t tell you how helpful I have found spiritual direction to be in my own life. I’ve been meeting with the same director for several years now, and I am so incredibly thankful for the room she creates for me to notice, connect with, and talk to God. Even though I have a faithful prayer life and my faith is an integrated and vibrant part of my daily life, I still meet with her once a month (and sometimes twice a month) and plan to meet with a spiritual director for the rest of my life. I have found it to be just that invaluable a part of my life.

I’d encourage you to consider spiritual direction as a regular part of your life, too. And if you are looking for a space to simply talk openly and honestly about your relationship with God or concept of God and your interior life, you are welcome to contact me here. I’d love to provide such space for you.

Are you familiar with spiritual direction? Have you ever met with a spiritual director? Do you have any questions about spiritual direction that you’d like to ask here? 

Learning Your Heart: Practicing Prayer of the Heart

One of the richest ways that I’ve learned to connect to the truth of my heart over the last several years is through what Henri Nouwen calls prayer of the heart. 

In his book The Way of the Heart (which I highly recommend — it’s a simple yet tremendous book), Nouwen distinguishes between prayer of the mind and prayer of the heart.

Prayer of the mind, he says, is what happens when we merely talk to God or think about God. Both of these activities are done from a place of detachment. We talk to God about things on our mind or things we’re trying to work out. This becomes a pseudo-form of prayer because we are, in effect, merely talking to ourselves. And thinking about God creates no engagement with God at all. What we think is prayer is more intellectual exercise or the creation of theological propositions. Who we are at our core has not shown up at all.

Prayer of the heart, however, is a different experience of prayer altogether. 

Prayer of the heart happens when the truth of who we are encounters the truth of who God is. 

How does that happen?

Nouwen gives us a helpful mental image of what this looks like. He quotes one of the desert fathers, who said:

“To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seing, within you.”

— The Way of the Heart, p. 73

What a great and helpful image this offers us! When I practice prayer of the heart, then, I actually imagine my mind descending through my body and landing every so slowly in the place of my heart.

My mind is often a jumbled, monkey-mind mix of thoughts and anxieties and projections and fears and to-do lists and questions, all colliding together and struggling to find any semblance of resolution or rest. But when my mind and heart begin to dwell together, the reality of who I am, in all my fullness, is present. The truth of myself is laid bare. I become aware of who I am and what is truly there.

And there, I find God standing before me, encountering this fullness of the truth of myself.

He sees me, and I see him. Here, we share a conversation.

We begin to engage in relationship.

Can you take a few moments and practice this prayer of the heart? Imagine your mind — everything within it — descending through your body and coming to rest in the place of your heart. Lay bare the truth of who you are in that moment. Then imagine the Lord God before you in that place. Allow him to see the truth of yourself, and allow yourself to look openly back upon him. What is this experience like for you?